1 La Noche de Enfrente and La Maleta (Raúl Ruiz) Life seems untenable without more films from Ruiz, whose final offeringsa feature that merrily journeys toward mortality, and his recently discovered and reworked first film, a mise en abyme short from 1963returned the exiled Chilean maestro to his homeland and to his initial funhouse style.

2 The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata) The time-defying precincts of the former Portuguese colony prove to be both an architectural and a semiotic jungle for the film’s unseen narrator in this tranny-noir essay-film, which combines the seedy exoticism and conspiratorial japery of Orson Welles with the displaced poetics of Chris Marker. Proceeding from Cindy Scrash’s version of “You Kill Me” (straight out of von Sternberg’s Macao) to a Kiss Me Deadly finale, Last Time treats cinephilia as a